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Implementing Web Analytics

Measuring arrivals, visitor activity, and departures is the
lifeblood of a web business. Without this information, you can’t make
smart decisions about your content, marketing, or business model. You can
collect basic analytics data, such as bounce rate and visits, with just a
few minutes’ work.

More advanced deployment—tracking goals, building custom segments,
and tagging content—takes work, however. And if you want to use analytics
for accounting data (such as daily orders) as well as for site
optimization, you’ll probably have to work with the development team to
extract additional information from backend databases.

There are free (or cheap) analytics solutions from the big
advertising vendors, and Google Analytics has done a tremendous amount to
make web operators aware of analytics.

Whatever you’re doing, your implementation will have six basic
steps:

Defining your site’s goals

Setting up data capture

Setting up filtering

Identifying segments by which to analyze goals

Tagging page content

Verifying that everything is working

Let’s look at the steps you’ll need to take to implement web
analytics.

Define Your Site’s Goals

Your first step is to understand and map out your web
business.

That might sound like a platitude, but it’s an essential step in the process. Grab a whiteboard and some markers, and draw out your site using the places-and-tasks model outlined above. In each place, list what makes a visitor “productive.” For each task, identify the steps a visitor ...

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